


Then Would the Moon Go Raving

by Mrinalinee



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-12
Updated: 2009-06-12
Packaged: 2018-01-06 19:52:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1110861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mrinalinee/pseuds/Mrinalinee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In his lifetime, there was a sorceress who held in her cupped palms the power of life and death, and offered it to him like water.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Then Would the Moon Go Raving

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written during season 1, and thus takes into no account revelations of later seasons.

>   
>  "And if she were to admit  
>  The world weaved by her feet  
>  Is leafless, is incomplete?  
>  And if she abandoned it,  
>  Broke the pivoted dance,  
>  Set loose the audience?  
>  Then would the moon go raving,  
>  The moon, the anchorless  
>  Moon go swerving  
>  Down at the earth for a catastrophic kiss."  
>  \--Philip Larkin, "The Dancer"  
> 

_observance_

She kisses him, tender and almost absent, in a hallway beside a window, and he, who has never indulged himself, stands still for it. 

His son and heir is in the next room. His son-and-heir is in the next room, dying, and he is accepting this, this thing that isn’t quite comfort from his ward, from the daughter of his dear – dear departed – friend.

“This is weakness,” he tells her. A king cannot afford weakness.

She moves back, her glare narrow and long-eyed. She’s distraught, he realizes, and thus is surprised by Morgana, and by himself.

“I’m not the weak one,” she says.

 

Her voice, which is too often harsh, which is too often defiant, is not like Ygraine’s lilting tones. But the curve of her mouth, a slow precipitation, reminds him of the music his wife loved.

He would like to see her smile again.

 

In his lifetime, there was a woman whose voice was soft like her hands, and when she danced, her face blurred in the water, and her reflection caught and flickered like light.

 

This is weakness: the tension in her thighs, the cold-warm sweat between them, her fingers’ grip on his wrists.

In her bones, her live, fragile bones, he counts out those who have died for his kingdom; but inevitably he runs out of Morgana before he runs out of bodies, and he’s forgotten many of them already, sorcerers don’t deserve remembrance. 

(“Show me,” she said. “Show me what you’ve sacrificed to keep your kingdom safe,”

and he did, murmuring the names into her forehead, into the bruised knobs of her wrists.)

In his mind, he starts like this, invariably: one, the column of her spine, the sharp harsh cut of her spine – _Ygraine_. 

They have the same spine, long and vulnerable. The spine is a familiar thing, although the body is an entirely new one. Morgana’s body is not like the body that he remembers, nothing like that unthinking, vibrant body. Morgana’s body is full of nervous energy, a body in need of protection. 

He will keep this body safe, although he could not keep the other. He will keep this body _here_ ; he will keep this body _his_.

He recognizes the desire, which is an overwhelming urge to covet (that which is already his), a drive to guard and shelter; so that although he cannot find in Morgana the remembrance of his wife that he cannot find in Arthur, he _knows_ her, and with her, he knows himself.

This is not weakness.

He will not let this become weakness.

 

He makes an announcement: “A great outrage has been perpetrated upon our kingdom. But this sorcerer, like all sorcerers, is just a man, and a foolish one at that, to think that his designs would go unnoticed and unpunished. The execution is set at dawn tomorrow, and all shall be in attendance.”

 _Outrage_ , he says, but outrage is not what he feels, only: relief. The brazenness of sorcerers no longer surprises him, and it was a clever sorcerer, one that hoodwinked both his son and his most trusted advisor. Relief, only, that the sorcery was discovered and terminated. Relief that once again, by some unknown providence, his son has been kept safe, his kingdom kept safe.

Morgana is conspicuously absent.

“Morgana is indisposed,” he says, although nobody has asked.

“If you will excuse me, Sire. I must see to – I must see to the execution,” says Arthur, and bows, and leaves. 

The execution has been set; everything has been seen to already.

“The prince has suffered a great shock; his ability to what is right has been tested in the past few days. But he has not been found wanting,” he says. (No one has asked.)

He does not look at Morgana’s empty seat.

 

Weakness, too, this: the way his son offers up his kingdom for a sorcerer in disguise, a sorcerer who is no better than he should be.

(“Child-“ he says.

“Don’t call me child,” says Morgana.)

He will not confine his son, but he will not concede.

The son must not repeat the mistakes of the father.

 

 _luminescence_

In the days after the execution, Uther catches glimpses of the king Arthur will become: a quieter, graver Arthur, who tilts his head at just that proud-respectful angle that his own body still remembers. 

“I know how hard this must have been for you, my son,” he says. “But you must ensure that you do not become hard because of it; you must always act in the name of justice and not in the name of yourself.” (These were words that his father said to him once, and they sounded strange to him then, as they taste strange to him now.)

“I have no intention of doing otherwise, my lord,” says Arthur.

“Good,” he says.

 

Morgana shutters through the corridors like a cracked reflection, like a particle trapped in smoke. 

He’s never had any use for mirrors – he can’t tell which side is which.

She’s waiting for something. (So is he.)

 

“I must obey my king,” says Arthur, not looking at him, and this, that Arthur averts his eyes as if forgetful of the honour he is permitted – meeting the eyes of the king – that Arthur obeys the king because he must, but not his father because he _will_ , this seems wrong; although it shouldn’t, it feels wrong. 

 

He has gone to Morgana before, but he will not do it now, and she no longer comes to him. He sends for her and she does not even have the courtesy to feign ill, she does not have the courtesy to send word back.

He becomes accustomed, once again, to eating alone.

He feels a visceral thing, gnawing away at his interior, and calls it _anger_ because he does not want to call it _regret_. 

 

For the first time in months (years) he walks the streets of his kingdom. His people turn to him in deference, which is something akin to respect and he wonders – 

 

He wonders.

 

In the weeks after the execution, he catches glimpses of a woman that he will never know, proud and all but silent, flickering between doorways and closed-off rooms. 

Sometimes, she inclines her head, just so, and the air ripples around her skirts in a wave.

 

He hesitates outside her door, he turns, he leaves.

 

In his lifetime, there was a sorceress who held in her cupped palms the power of life and death, and offered it to him like water. Her eyes were a colour that he sees sometimes in his dreams, in his castle, and when she smiled (in her open, wavering hands), the rains came.

 

He starts from sleep like this: her mouth against his temple, a knife to his throat, another in his ribs. He is aware, for the first time in weeks, of his heartbeat, an unsteady rhythm, unmodulated. His breath catches in his lungs like drowning, like a memory of pain that can only be realized by equating it with other pain.

“Uther. Stand,” she says. “Yield.” Just beyond her mouth, the words are pleading, hovering half a beat from the edge of humanity. _Which edge_ , he wonders, but this is her weakness, not his.

One last lesson then, for a child who would only learn the hard way (the lesson he knows best.)

He raises his chin, he straightens his spine (he is the king.) “Never,” he says.


End file.
